I believe the originals are restored now

Nope. They temporarily made it so that buying Definitive Edition on the Rockstar Launcher granted the originals until outrage died down, but the original versions of the games still require either a disc or piracy now that they seemingly removed even that. I can confirm that the PS4 versions of the games that were the PS2 versions in an emulator are still missing, too.

Switching to Firefox worked great.

Linux suffers from being a patchwork of hobbyists updates, corporate additions, and patchy distro support. When it comes down to it, if you have an issue, you either have to solve it on your own or hope and pray the elitists on StackOverflow are in a good mood.

Honestly, every OS kinda sucks.

Debatable, considering all that’s stopping you from using it for free is a watermark and lack of personalization options.

Plus, I’m using the Windows 10 Education key my college gave me, and my Windows 7 Home key from way back in the day would work too, as well as the Windows 8 key that came with my Surface Pro 3. The cost feels like a formality tbh.

In the U.S. circa 2016, so many kids were just finding pirate streaming sites for movies and such during class on school computers. I imagine it’s similar elsewhere for students who’ve finished their work and are bored, but boy, now they have the knowledge of how to get countless other types of media for free.

Piracy is a service problem. The goal shouldn’t be to indoctrinate our youth to avoid it, it should be to stop releasing subpar, overpriced products.

2. This is clear and willful culture ignorance and I implore you to give Grand Theft Auto V a casual play as a relevant, reasonably modern, and prevalent example of how this isn’t the case.
3. I’m not in the business of pretending I know someone’s physical attributes based on some text. I’ve had multiple people throughout the years surprise me with info about who they are after literal years of “knowing” them.

Probably because

1. The n-word is dropped in a less interesting section of the rant that could feasibly be skipped
2. It’s not a hard R
3. We don’t know the race of the author
4. The t-slur comes way earlier and is seen on multiple occasions, perhaps prompting a comment prior to finishing reading.

I don’t care about privacy or centralization, I just wanted Boost and they decided to kill that.

We are literally on a post with game devs explicitly asking you to pirate rather than purchase stolen keys from resellers. It has nothing to do with “dealers,” it has to do with the effects on the developers who have to deal with the fallout of the stolen keys. This isn’t hard to understand, it has been repeated by several indie devs throughout the years and I’m pretty sure they know more about their problems than you do, pal.

I have Disney+ for Marvel and Star Wars, $4 Google Play rent or theater watch everything else because I’m not a big TV/Movie guy.

Had Gamepass Ultimate, dropped them when they shut down the family plan, raised the price of Ultimate by $2/mo, cut the value of gold-to-ult conversion pretty significantly, and ditched the monthly games in favor of a perpetual list of games I mostly already own.

My new preferred plan is PS+ Premium+PC Gamepass, in part because the game offerings on PS+ are actually pretty good, but also because I realized that I can very sustainably get PC Gamepass from Microsoft Rewards. They have an auto-redeem plan with a low enough point value that, if I were to do nothing except the daily Bing/Edge searches, I’d rack up enough points for the next month in 25 days. That’s pretty significant for something I can mostly do sitting on the shitter.

Bastard is as bastard does.

You’re telling me…

all cops are bastards?

Like Gabe Newell once said, piracy is a service problem.

The last two things I pirated were No One Lives Forever, a game that’s completely delisted on all storefronts, and Ratchet & Clank, because Sony can’t figure out how to add the PS2 versions of games to the PS5 and I refuse to stream it (data cap) or lug around my PS3.

Both I would’ve purchased legally had they not made it a pain in the ass.